Games

John Riccitiello Thinks Games Can Beat Movies

At the box office

By Andrei Dumitrescu, Games Editor

15th of April 2008, 10:00 GMT

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I've said it before and I will say it again and again if I need to. Crossovers are a bad thing. Movies based on games tend to flop big time after eating huge piles of money from the treasuries of the movies studios. The money that went into making crap like the Doom movie could have funded quite a few Rome episodes (yap, I'm a history buff). And movies based on games are marketing tools designed to extract money using a familiar intellectual property rather than clear efforts

to translate movie action in videogames. LEGO Star Wars succeeded not because it was based on Star Wars, but because it had a well designed mechanic that made the game fun. Of course, the Star Wars setting helped a lot, but the game was much more than a clear movie-to-game translation.

But in other ways there seems to be synergy between games and movies. More and more videogames are being described as being "cinematic". One should only think of the pretty incredible production value that went into Call of Duty 4 and the way it used very movie-like sequences to create emotion and interest.

Now, Electronic Arts boss John Riccitiello is saying that he gets the feeling that some movie producers are getting scared by the competition that games can offer to the film industry. Worldwide ticket sales are down, while worldwide game sales are up. There's something very scary about a new medium that threatens the big executives from Hollywood by playing their game better than they play it.

John says that: "The buzz in Hollywood, which I heard from some Hollywood folks... Is people are worried whether Iron Man the movie is going to get killed by Grand Theft Auto the game. I don't think I've ever heard of that before." Well, the Iron Man movie might not be the biggest release of the year, but it's still something.

Riccitiello thinks that the balance is beginning to shift more and more as games sell more, while movies don't draw the same crowds. He believes that "There is more interest today from Hollywood to make movies out of our games than there is interest in our industry to make games out of their movies. There's a big reset happening now."

I personally have high hopes for the future Street Fighter movie. Chun-Li must not disappoint.

TAGS:

Electronic Arts | Hollywood | competition | Street Fighter: Legend of Chun-Li | Doom

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